The history of environmental education in Australia is political, and fraught with power battles. Indeed, environmental education in Australia (as in many places elsewhere) has always been political. The early calls for environmental education came as a response to the perceived growing environmental crises on the 1960s. At this time, it was seen as a scientific and social priority by scientists, environmentalists and academics, but it was not seen as an educational priority by education departments. Rather, environmental educators were treated as yet another adjectival education lobby group wanting space in an already overcrowded curriculum. There was a time when most state education authorities were engaging with environmental education, but the politicisation of the placement of sustainability as (an optional) cross-curriculum priority has enabled avoidance of the politics of environmental issues and thereby a political stance that is tacitly supporting the status quo of the current neoliberal political systems. This article argues that the times have changed and so has the nature of politics and power bases, and it is time to rethink approaches to environmental education research and recognise that the politics of the past may not be the politics of the future as the generations grow different.

In this essay, we argue that postqualitative inquiry is not a useful descriptor for environmental education research and that it is time to consider what comes after the posts. We argue that thinking with theory as a process methodology in the onto-epistemological framings of our research is more generative and opens up opportunities for this research being interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary, intersectional, ecofeminist/more-than-humanist, indigenous, participatory, experimental and transgressive.

2014 represents the 30th year of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education (AJEE), making it one of the oldest academic journals in environmental education still in publication. The oldest is The Journal of Environmental Education, founded in 1969. Another journal, The International Journal of Environmental Education and Information, was founded in 1981 but is no longer in publication, and the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education, also founded in 1984, has not had any issues since 2011.

This article explores the changing ways ‘environment’ has been represented in the discourses of environmental education and education for sustainable development (ESD) in United Nations (and related) publications since the 1970s. It draws on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and discusses the increasingly dominant view of the environment as a ‘natural resource base for economic and social development’ (United Nations, 2002, p. 2) and how this instrumentalisation of nature is produced by discourses and ‘ecotechnologies’ that ‘identify and define the natural realm in our relationship with it’ (Boetzkes, 2010, p. 29). This denaturation of nature is reflected in the priorities for sustainable development discussed at Rio+20 and proposed successor UNESCO projects. The article argues for the need to reassert the intrinsic value of ‘environment’ in education discourses and discusses strategies for so doing. The article is intended as a wake-up call to the changing context of the ‘environment’ in ESD discourses. In particular, we need to respond to the recent UNESCO (2013a, 2013b) direction of global citizenship education as the successor to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005–2014 that continues to reinforce an instrumentalist view of the environment as part of contributing to ‘a more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable world’ (UNESCO, 2013a, p. 3).

This paper reviews Australian Government actions related to environmental education, particularly in the past decade, and examines the actions forthcoming from two national action plans (Environment Australia, 2000 and DEWHA, 2009), the implementation strategy for the Decade of ESD (DEWHA, 2006) and developments related to the Australian Curriculum. This analysis is inspired by the Australian-ness of the metaphor of the curriculum as a jigsaw puzzle suggested by Robottom (1987), the seemingly constant battle for survival in the formal curriculum that environmental education has faced since the 1970s (Fensham, 1990; Gough, 1997), and the ongoing tensions between science education and environmental education in Australia's formal school curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between national economic and political priorities and environmental education policy formulation and curriculum strategies. This relationship will be placed in the historical context of developments in environmental education in Australia from 1970 until the present and will be analysed in terms of the ideological and pedagogical stances implicit, and explicit, in the developments during this period. I will argue that the emphasis throughout the period has been to sustain the development of environmental education without any questioning of why, what and how this development should occur.

‘Sustainable development’ has become a slogan for governments, industry and conservation groups in recent times. It was the subtitle for the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN 1980) and the National Conservation Strategy for Australia (DHAE 1984) - living resource conservation for sustainable development - and was popularised in the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, more commonly known as the Brundtland Report or Our Common Future (WCED 1987). The definition of sustainable development given in the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN 1980: section 1.3) and repeated in the National Conservation Strategy for Australia (DHAE 1984: 12) is as follows: